The Collider 2 Review

In space, no-one can hear you break the sound barrier

Developer:Shortbreak Studios Publisher:Shortbreak StudiosPlatform: PC

By Aza Hudson on May 31, 2016

Just how fast and/or furious is this sequel to a mobile game?

If you’ve ever seen a space opera, chances are that you’ve seen a scene that depicts a sole spaceship making its way through a hostile enemy base. Dipping and diving, zipping from left to right, listing lazily to the left, avoiding all kinds of obstacles as they delve deeper and deeper inside the lair of whatever evil the sci-fi gods have created. Aliens, evil empires, fedoras, whatever. The point is, those scenes are awesome! Now, those scenes as a video game? You know you want it. The Collider 2 is precisely that kind of game. The sequel to a mobile game released in 2014, The Collider 2 promises to break your perception of reality with just how Sanic Fast it is. But can it really be as fast as a reversing truck from Big Rigs?

The stage is thus: Aliens have decided that Earth looks a bit shit and decides to shoot lasers at it. You’re a dude in a fighter spaceship and it’s your job to go up into that alien mothership. Then, you are to make like ebola and destroy it from the inside but without all the bodily fluids going everywhere. You destroy this menace to humankind and all the other inferior lifeforms that share our planet by completing missions with varying objectives. Sometimes, you gotta complete a time trial. Other times you’ll be collecting glowy orbs, destroying stuff, and killing bosses. And that’s it. The lack of variety may put off some players, but The Collider 2 makes every use of this strict game structure with missions being nice and short. By completing missions, and being a bad enough dude to complete secondary skill-based objectives, you attain Medals which are used to unlock more levels and Coins that are used to upgrade your ship and purchase ships that you need to progress through the game. This is all fine at the beginning but when the fourth set of missions (called Sectors) requires you to buy a ship for 10,000 coins to progress, you’re forced to replay past missions. If you’ve been a hardass and gotten the majority of medals already, then you are shit out of luck unless you’re willing to painfully backtrack. This, fortunately, is the only really bad thing to say about this delightful romp.

“You’ve got boost power!”

These illegal aliens shouldn’t have jumped the queue.

The tight controls perfectly complement the breakneck pace of the game as well. I found myself having a lot of fun by simply drinking in the ludicrous speed of the whole situation. But what speedy dodging game would be complete without its obstacles? You’ll start with the child’s play, like walls that have holes in them and they spin nice and slowly? Yawn. But as you progress through the game’s levels, these obstacles start getting more devious. The walls start spinning faster than your last acid trip, you get lasers coming at you, stuff starts popping up only at the last second…it never ends. The pain. The frustration. The cries of all the dumb animals being roasted by aliens, even though that’s…not actually in the game. I think I have a problem. While the screams of death may never go away, I do still have the neat visuals to help me dull them out. The Collider 2‘s use of colour to indicate obstacle variety borders on excellence, and each different roadblock in your way looks entirely different to the last. I never found myself blaming the game for my failures, which should stand as an ultimate testament to the game’s good use of its own aspects.

Final thoughts

The Collider 2 certainly isn’t a perfect game, its progression system is incredibly unfair and there’s not much meat to it, but that doesn’t stop it from being fun as Hell. The missions themselves are great, but their variety leaves a lot to be desired. Its current price point on Steam is negligible though, which makes this a great game to blow a weekend on.

Good

Bad

Has A Crack

Aza blames his stunted social skills and general uselessness on a lifetime of video games. Between his ears is a comprehensive Team Fortress 2 encyclopedia. His brain, on the other hand, remains at large.